But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence.
—Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence,” 1964
Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood and released in the fall of 2010, is variously described as a supernatural drama or even “a spiritual thriller.”1 It raises a number of issues of interest to philosophers, most especially about the epistemic status of so-called near-death experiences, as well as attitudes toward death and the possibility of survival. Some of these issues are dealt with elsewhere in this volume (in McFarland’s essay and in my own other essay). They are not, however, the focus of the present essay. Instead, I want to look at a very unusual feature of this film: its use of silence. My thesis is three-fold: first, that Eastwood has fashioned the use of silence on the model of his own preferred and very “spare” style of acting; second, that he has intuited elements of how silence functions at a neurobiological level; and third, that such uses of silence, when seen in the light of contemporary neuroscience, open up a rich set of possibilities for placing filmmaking itself on a scientific basis. I start with the phenomenology of silence in this very intriguing film.
There are several kinds of silence that occur in this film. The first type involves at least four major episodes, each lasting from twenty to forty seconds, during which there is no sound of any kind in the film. These typically involve either a single major character: for example, Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), or George Lonegan (Matt Damon); or a distinctive couple: for example, the twins Jason and Marcus (Frankie McLaren and George McLaren), or Marie and George together (toward the end of the film). These episodes of silence occur at emotionally key moments in the film, moments which it is important for us to remember later on if we are to make sense of the entire film and its narrative arc. Thus, the earliest of these episodes occurs while Marie is undergoing her near-death experience during the tsunami, an experience that is pivotal for the whole film.2 Another very poignant silent episode occurs just after Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard) leaves George’s apartment. We see him standing in the vestibule of his home, with a single overhead light in front him and with his back to us. We know at this point that he himself has despaired of ever forming a successful partnership precisely because of his psychic “gift” (which he regards as a curse in large part for this reason). He knows that what has transpired between Melanie and him that evening is probably the end of this possible partnership as well. He says nothing and does nothing. But his whole bodily posture radiates that sense of despair.3 The precise function of the silence during this episode will concern us further below.
A second kind of silence in this film occurs when a particular actor might be expected to speak, but does not, these episodes lasting approximately two to five seconds. A third kind of silence, lasting for periods of five to ten seconds, occurs when an actor (often one of the main ones) is seen moving silently against a complex social background that involves ambient noise (opening and closing of doors, traffic sounds, footsteps, or the like), but without any sound coming from the actor. Fourth, there are ample instances of silence that function as rests during musical interludes. Eastwood, of course, is himself a notable musician and composer, and wrote the music for this film. He is especially fond of jazz and often writes pieces that start with very simple melodic lines (often in a minor key, played on piano or guitar) that contain rests typically lasting one to three seconds, followed by development of those simple melodies involving further instruments. There is nothing surprising about this, but such musical “gaps” acquire further significance in conjunction with the other types of silence that are found throughout this film.
So arresting are these uses of silence, especially in the four longest episodes, that some explanation for these practices is called for. I’m suggesting here that one part of this explanation lies in Eastwood’s own distinctive acting style (considered later). The other has to do with the functions of silence in the human brain, and here we need contemporary neuroscience to help understand what is going on.4
There are three discoveries made in recent neuroscientific studies of sound and silence in the human brain that are relevant to our subject. The first of these was made by Michael Wehr and his colleagues at the University of Oregon. They found that the primary auditory cortex (which lies along the top of the temporal lobe) contains two partially dissociable networks of neurons that are highly sensitive to the onset of sound and to the offset of sound (in other words, the beginning of silence). These networks partially overlap with one another, but their “tuning” and responsiveness to onset and offset of sounds are distinct from one another. The two networks, accordingly, generate two different signals in the primary auditory cortex for these two kinds of changes in our experience of sound. Such demarcation makes it possible for the brain to form a clearly delineated representation of sounds or silences (in other words, to represent auditory “objects”). Without such demarcation we would not have a coherent experience of sounds at all, but merely an auditory blur.5 Moreover, it appears that this segregation of on and off pathways for sound processing runs right through from the basilar membrane to the auditory thalamus and the auditory cortex. Thus, the onset of sounds and the offset of sounds are processed in parallel but independent pathways all along the auditory hierarchy. Silence, then, carries with it distinctive neurobiological markers and boundaries, just as sound itself does. We may speak, then, of a neural representative of silence as itself an auditory object. As such, we might expect silence, at least in the brain, to have other surprising qualities. And such appears to be the case.
A team at Sheffield University presented experiment subjects with a single spoken phrase (emotionally neutral) made up of three to four words and lasting one to two seconds, followed by forty or more seconds of silence, watching brain activity by real-time fMRI and using noise-canceling earphones to screen out ambient and machine noises. What they found was the spontaneous appearance in the primary auditory cortex (PAC) of a pattern of spiking neural signals at roughly fifteen seconds (post silence), thirty seconds, and forty seconds. They occurred in the speech-sensitive area of the PAC and are believed to derive from auditory memory.6 What is happening here is that the brain is filling the silence with auditory information generated by itself. Julien Voisin and his team in Lyon, France, also found fMRI evidence for spontaneous neural activation during silence, in this case in an experimental set-up in which the subjects were expecting sound to occur and were directed to detect it upon occurrence (being cued as to which side of the head the sound would appear to come from). In this case, silence lasted up to 7.5 seconds (between tones) and activity was relative to the resting state blood oxygenation level signal. Activation was found in the auditory areas, frontal cortical areas, and parietal areas, as well as the thalamus and caudate nucleus (both limbic structures). Activation was contralateral to the expected side of “hearing.” The neuroscientists interpreted these signals as “anticipatory.” The point for us is that here, too, the brain generated its own auditory signals during silence, in the complete absence of any relevant external stimulus.7
In a third, related series of experiments, David Kraemer and his team at Dartmouth College made up individual recordings of music, some of it familiar to the experimental subjects, some of it not, some of it involving lyrics, some of it purely instrumental. They extracted short segments (two to five seconds) and replaced those with silence. They then scanned the brains of subjects listening to these recordings. They found evidence for spontaneous activation of the primary auditory cortex specific to the silent periods in the recordings. Such activation was strongest for familiar music and especially familiar instrumental music. Curiously enough, no experimental subject reported being aware of those silent episodes during familiar music, only during unfamiliar music. It thus appears that the brain spontaneously “papers over the cracks,” as it were, filling in the gaps especially where the occurrent sound is rich enough to evoke appropriate memories.8
These experiments establish several things about the nature of our neural experience of silence. The first is that the brain is designed to be responsive to silence in a fashion very similar to its responsiveness to sound. It is not difficult to see how possession of such sensitivity might be adaptive, especially in the early environment of adaptation for our species, when silence in an otherwise noisy environment might signal the presence of predators or of prey. We also learn that the brain is primed to pay attention to the onset or resumption of sound, following silence, and thereby also to pay attention to the boundaries of silence itself. Finally, we learn that the brain in some sense will not tolerate silence for very long without supplying its own spontaneous substitute for real sound, a kind of faux-sound that increases in strength as silence itself is prolonged. (This may account for our common experience of feeling anxious when silence sets in and endures.) We are often tempted to think of the brain as a passive instrument, waiting to respond to external stimuli, but instead it turns out that “the brain is a system intrinsically operating on its own and sensory information interacts with rather than determines the operation of the system,” as one of our investigators has put it.9 It is these attentional dynamics that concern me next. For with them we ascend from the level of neural behavior to that of psychological functions. It is here that silence acquires its uses in our film.
So, silence is something that the human brain is designed to respond to in its own fashion. More particularly, silence serves to alert the brain, alerting being one element of attention and especially of attention shifting. The other elements are orienting and executive control (with respect to the stimulus attended to). These elements of attention are distinct and mutually dissociable, with their own neural networks supporting them and involving various neurotransmitters (notably dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin). The alerting element of attention shifting is also part of what enables us to establish the salience of stimuli, and salience is a function of complex neural networks engaging areas of the frontal cortex, limbic system, and brain stem (of special importance here are the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and dorsal lateral portion of the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus). Salience detection and determination serves as a gating function for both auditory and visual attention shifting: that is, “only changes that reached a certain salience threshold caused a switch of attention” in appropriate empirical experiments.10 We do not attend to just any change in sound (or silence) and we do not attend on just any occasion. However, changes in the auditory environment can lead to involuntary and mandatory attention shifting. I posit that silence has similar functions, and thus that the deployment of significant episodes of silence in our film are well-designed to capture our attention and serve to alert us to what is going on in the film. Silence can be just as novel as sound can be, and the director can use silence to capture and focus our attention by taking advantage of automatic and reliable brain networks that control such functions.11
Attentional dynamics, in their turn, have important relationships with our short-term memory. This is the memory we use to observe something like a film and to hold enough of the information in our memory that we can shape the experience into something coherent and continuous (for example, a story). The various regions of the human brain that are responsible for these dynamics are further organized in two networks, each specialized for certain kinds of attentional problems (task-oriented or stimulus-oriented).12 These networks interact such that as demands on short-term or working memory increase, the level of activation in one network increases while the level in the other decreases. And this kind of trade-off or competition applies for both visual and auditory working memory tasks. It thus appears also that the brain is wired such that attentional dynamics can enhance short-term memory efficiency.13 Our director has intuited some of this, such that his major episodes of silence also limit the number of salient objects (namely, characters) that appear in them: either to a single person (Marie; George) or a couple (Marcus and Jason; Marie and George). By reducing sound to zero and limiting the number of salient objects in the visual scene, he enhances our ability to attend to the scene (and all of its affective and narrative associations) and to remember it. This includes, very probably, enhancing our capacity for “prospective memory,” which is our ability to realize intentions after a delay caused by distracting intervening tasks. Such memory is needed to keep track of the multiple narrative lines in Hereafter, and to coordinate what we learn early in the film with what occurs later on, despite intervening material and our attention to it. All of these practices correspond very closely to what we now know about the underlying biological dynamics of attention and memory, as well as of their interactions with one another.14
Indeed, we may go further. Our attention (and with it our emotional reactions) can be modulated by silence just as much as by sound. Hence the arresting quality of the silences in Hereafter, I suggest. Modulation of attentional processes, in turn, suggests the idea that silence itself can function as a signal, a mode of control available to the director that communicates his intentions toward us, his audience. Here it is relevant to remind the reader that the predicaments of Marie, George, and Marcus, the three main characters in our film and three of the characters most often involved in periods of silence, are fundamentally similar to one another. All three are involved in relational predicaments involving their isolation from other people and the affective consequences of that isolation. For Marcus, it is isolation from his dead twin, Jason, and the terrible anxiety this causes him. George is cut off from the possibility for a durable intimate relationship with a woman and lives with the very kind of black despair that Dickens records in the novel George listens to (David Copperfield). And Marie is unable, until she meets George, to find anyone who fully enters into the reality of her own near-death experience and her wonderment about the visions she had during that experience. Even her own lover, Didier (Thierry Neuvic), has abandoned her, at least in part due to her obsession with figuring out what it was that happened to her during the tsunami and what might be its ultimate significance.15 These predicaments are all solved in the course of our film (marking it firmly as a romantic drama, as opposed to a tragic one): Marcus learns, with George’s help, that he can in fact live successfully “on his own” without his twin. In learning this, Marcus also learns that he can live successfully without the daily presence of his mother, Jackie (Lyndsey Marshal), who is a drug addict and has been removed to a treatment facility. We see this latter effect late in the film when Marcus is reunited temporarily with Jackie. The whole scene reflects his advanced emotional maturity and independence. That new capacity for independent living is what makes his joyous reunion with Jackie possible. George and Marie link up with one another (an event itself signaled by a significant period of silence of my first type). And in doing so, they resolve each other’s relational/affective predicaments. Our attention to major episodes of silence enhances our ability to give appropriate weight to these changes by way both of enhanced attention and memory for important elements of their respective stories.
It is a fundamental rule of good storytelling that one must “show, don’t tell.” And Eastwood himself has said, “The story is king.”16 That is, he conceives his own role as director and actor primarily in terms of communicating the story and not of talking about it. What I suggest here is that in a film like Hereafter, which is dominated by three individual stories that eventually converge into a single coherent narrative, this aspect of “show, don’t tell” is partially constituted by the director’s use of silence. It is not so much that he tells us the story by means of silence as that he orchestrates our attention to, our memory for, and our emotional responsiveness to that story by means of silence. There is thus between the director and his audience a communication by means of silence. Silence, of course, is not a visual phenomenon, so we need some new version of “show, don’t tell” that can encompass such silent communications: perhaps “speak but do not utter.” They may well be akin to communicative gestures, a capacity for which very likely underlies our linguistic abilities (both ontogenetically and phylogenetically) and which is available to our closest primate relative.17 Gesture, of course, is also a quintessential part of any actor’s repertoire of communicative devices. And this brings us close to one other possible determinant for Eastwood’s masterful use of communicative silence in Hereafter.
Clint Eastwood has always been noted for his laconic style of acting. He regularly portrays men of few words. Indeed, in some films, as James R. Couch has shown elsewhere in this volume, it is his nonverbal communications that are among the most effective. And we know from scientific studies that the human brain is well-adapted to receive such communications, especially affectively charged nonverbal communications conveyed by facial expressions or whole-body language. The human face is the most expressive part of the human body, in emotional terms, notably the region around the eyes, followed by the region around the mouth. Eastwood has learned or intuited the value of these expressive instruments and makes full use of them in his acting. He has become an icon of the verbally terse and minimalist style of acting. The neural substrata for our ability to take in such forms of communication are now well understood. Moreover, we also know that facial expressions and whole-body emotional language apprehension is relatively fast (supported by perhaps the fastest-responding part of the limbic system, the amygdala, which can process stimuli presented for as little as twenty-six milliseconds), largely reliable, and enhanced by the use of gestures.18 There is a further study to be made, in my view, of Eastwood’s acting style in terms of a more detailed analysis of these nonverbal dynamics and use of multimodal systems of communication. For the present, however, it is enough to note that his laconic style is well-suited to the exploitation of silence for communicative purposes. As Norman Mailer noted in his 1983 interview with Eastwood, “He is one actor who can put his soul into his eyes.”19 But not only so. Eastwood also has been known to project his preference for verbally minimal acting onto the scripts he acts from. Mailer records this in terms of the following anecdote told by Eastwood himself:
I always was a different kind of person, even when I started acting. I guess I finally got to a point where I had enough nerve to do nothing. . . . My first film with Sergio Leone had a script with tons of dialogue, tremendously expository, and I just cut it all down. Leone thought I was crazy. Italians are used to much more vocalizing, and I was playing this guy who didn’t say much of anything. I cut it all down. Leone didn’t speak any English so he didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but he got so he liked it after a while.20
Such reduction of verbal content in the film script makes perfect sense, given that Eastwood himself prefers a verbally minimal style of acting. Both his acting style, then, and this quasi-directorial minimalizing of the script already suggest very strongly a predilection for silence in communication with his audience.
Another possible influential factor has to do with the importance to Eastwood of music (especially jazz), both as a musician himself and as a composer. Here is his own comment (with reference to his 2002 film Blood Work: “Composing, especially, is very important to me. Blood Work, I felt, needed a real subtle score. Oftentimes today, the musical scores are so overwhelming. The scores were so wall-to-wall. I love music. When used properly, it can be very effective. Also, the lack of music can be very effective. I did not want a real grandiose score in Blood Work. Some films can be musical without having any music at all—the silences, the sounds.”21 As I noted earlier in this essay, the music Eastwood composed for Hereafter is marked especially by initial simple melodic lines, usually played by a single instrument, and with plenty of rests or silent periods marking out the tonal shifts in the melodies. It is a common aspect of musical education and training that the hardest things to get right in playing, for example, a Mozart piano concerto or even the works of more contemporary composers such as Satie or Bartok, are the rests. Beginning musicians are prone to rush them, not giving them their full values. But without playing the rests appropriately, the rhythm and tonal dynamics of the music will be misconstrued. And then the overall emotional and imaginative impact of the music can be compromised or lost. Eastwood knows this especially from his experience as a jazz pianist. And his musical scores reflect the same conviction: silence can be as emotionally eloquent as sound, especially when silence punctuates sound and thus modulates our emotional responses to it. What he probably did not know is that this creative and artistic intuition has a sound footing in the neurobiology of human cognitive responses to silence and sound both.
One reason, then, why the neuroscience matters to our understanding of Eastwood’s work is that it vindicates his artistic intuition. What I think we see in the directing work of his maturity is a capacity, among other things, to control the affective responses of his audience by means of very subtle effects, including those of silence. This almost certainly represents an extension of his personal preferences by means of the direction that he gives to his films, perhaps most clearly and forcefully in Hereafter.22 But there are further reasons why the science might matter to our understanding of a film like this, and of Eastwood’s work as a natural philosopher.
I have tried to argue that Eastwood uses silence in Hereafter to orchestrate and direct the affective, attentional, and memory capacities of his audience in such a way as to complement the acting, plotting, and cinematography of his film. Moreover, I have tried to suggest that his practice in this regard has a solid footing in the neurobiology of the human brain and its cognitive processes with respect to sound and silence, as well as their affective accompaniments. One reason for exploring the brain science, then, is to vindicate his artistic intuition. But there are further reasons for bringing our scientific knowledge of human cognition to bear on film techniques of this kind. And these reasons might serve as a further answer to the perfectly pertinent and insightful question “Why does this matter?”
One such reason is that the neuroscience opens up for us a perspective on the dynamics of sound and silence that is common to the members of our species and not merely specific to a particular cultural setting. It is, of course, a truism that cultural variations can and commonly do affect our cognitive processes and may be reflected in them. But the fundamental dynamics of neural processing are common to all biologically intact adult members of our species. We do not expect to find fundamental variations in such processing as we move from human group to human group. Culture, in this respect, does not trump biology. (Of course, such claims, about the neural representation of silence in particular, are easily subjected to empirical testing across cultural lines. Every neuroscientist worth her salt would be happy to do so.) A closely related gain of coordinating the neurobiology of silence with the phenomenology of silence in a film like Hereafter is to help us avoid a merely subjective response to those dynamics. Here, viewer response comes into contact with a more objective basis for that response. Murray Smith has put the same point in a recent essay: “we are latching onto real features of the world—of the embodied agents we refer to as people or character—rather than projecting or imposing ‘assorted contemporary Western ideas . . . onto the experience of others,’ as Catherine Lutz would have it.”23 It is this element of realism that undergirds the universality of grounding filmmaking practices in biological processes.
There are many variants of realism in philosophical discourse, to be sure. Here I want to take advantage of what some have called “practical realism”—that is, the realism that is grounded in our successful explanatory practices, whether the practices of common sense or of the natural sciences. Earmarks of such practices are that they are susceptible to error. Without the possibility of making mistakes, we are almost certainly not functioning in an objective realm or manner. “In objective matters, one stands subject to correction . . . objectivity is closely connected to the possibility of error.”24 Scientific practices are, of course, fallible and thus revisable and replaceable. Accordingly, so are the ontological commitments of scientific explanatory practices. A further aspect of such practical realism is that scientific explanations are publicly accessible to any suitably qualified observer. The combination of these features determines, in my view, the primary epistemic value of such explanations (as also those of common sense). To the extent that Eastwood’s use of silence in Hereafter can be grounded scientifically, thus far we have reason to think that both he and we, his critical audience, have fastened upon aspects of reality and are not merely making a heuristically valuable contribution to film criticism.
Smith’s 2008 essay referred to above explores mainly issues having to do with emerging neuroscience of human emotions, and their relevance to film interpretation (in his case applied specifically to the German film cycle Heimat [Edgar Reitz, 1984, 1992, 2004]). The scientific grounding, in his view, “provides us with a keener understanding of what an emotion is, and allows us to propose critical descriptions and interpretations that are sensitive to features of the emotions of characters and spectators that might otherwise go unnoticed.”25 I hope to have done the same with regard to elements of affect, attention, and memory connected to the uses of silence in Hereafter. A further value of the neuroscience, then, is to focus our critical attention on aspects of filmmaking and film viewing that we might otherwise overlook.
Finally, I hope to have given sufficient grounds for suggesting direct scientific investigation into the effects of silence in films in the brains of their viewers. That is, we may here have the basis for a new area of exploration in the emerging field of “neurocinematics.” Here the work of Uri Hasson and his colleagues is of particular importance. Hasson has developed techniques for scanning simultaneously the brains of several viewers while they are watching films. He has used recent popular films, in particular, for this purpose (including The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). He has thereby been able to show that viewers coordinate their neural responses to films, including visual scene analysis, with one another, such “inter-subject correlation analysis” generating a dynamic (and publicly accessible) view of how an audience interacts with the film at a neural level.26 Hasson’s team has also thereby demonstrated how the neural activity of film viewers is a function of film content, editing, and directing. My proposal here is that these techniques be adopted for similar empirical exploration of inter-subjective neural responses to silence in films. Related aspects of attention-shifting, visual scene analysis, and memory (including prospective memory) might be explored by means of similar techniques. Affective responses in all these areas could also be explored in an inter-subjective way, by means of physiological correlatives of stress (including heart rhythms, skin conductance, cortisol-generation), which belong to the autonomic nervous system, especially the parasympathetic branch of it. Correlative biochemistry of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, vasopressin, serotonin, and the like, could also be drawn into this project. In sum, there is nothing standing in the way of a full-fledged scientific program investigating further the objective correlatives of the psychological phenomena surrounding film silence. My prediction is that once that program reaches maturity, it will only further vindicate the native genius and practical realism of Clint Eastwood.
1. See blurb at Netflix: https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Hereafter/70134615?locale=en-US. For “supernatural drama,” see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereafter_(film)/.
2. The salient real-world event reflected here is the tsunami that struck Indonesia and other areas of the region on December 26, 2004, killing over 160,000 people and leaving nearly 200,000 homeless. For a study of psychological resilience in children who survived the tsunami see Y. Hestyanti, “Children Survivors of the 2004 Tsunami in Ache, Indonesia,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1094 (2006): 303–307. The issue of resilience and its significance for Eastwood’s films will be treated at greater length in my other essay in this volume.
3. The emotional expressiveness of the whole human body is the subject of research by Beatrice de Gelder and her colleagues in the Netherlands: see, for example, B. de Gelder et al., “Standing Up for the Body: Recent Progress in Uncovering the Networks Involved in the Perception of Bodies and Bodily Expressions,” Neuroscience and BioBehavioral Reviews 34 (2010): 513–527; and C. Sinke, M. Kret, and B. de Gelder, “Body Language: Embodied Perception of Emotion,” in Measurement with Persons: Theory, Methods and Implementation Areas, ed. B. Berglund, G. Rossi, J. Townsend, and L. Pendrill (New York: Psychological Press, 2012), 335–352. For discussion of the neural regions (especially the amygdala and the insular cortex) and processing times involved, see R. McClelland, “A Naturalistic View of Human Dignity,” Journal of Mind and Behavior 32 (2011): 24–29.
4. The issue of silence in Eastwood’s music is a further and distinctive explanatory factor here, in my view. However, I am not competent to pursue the matter. It is only one aspect of Eastwood’s musicianship that we regret not being able to treat in greater detail in this volume.
5. B. Scholl, X. Gao, and M. Wehr, “Non-Overlapping Sets of Synapses Drive On Responses and Off Responses in Auditory Cortex,” Neuron 65 (2010): 412–421. Compare also K. Yasmashiro et al., “Automatic Auditory Off-Response in Humans: An MEG Study,” European Journal of Neuroscience 30 (2009): 125–131; and K. Yamashiro, K. Inui, N. Otsuru, and R. Kakigi, “Change-Related Responses in the Human Auditory Cortex: An MEG Study,” Psychophysiology 48 (2011): 23–30.
6. M. Hunter et al., “Neural Activity in Speech-Sensitive Auditory Cortex During Silence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 189–194.
7. J. Voisin, A. Bidet-Caulet, O. Bertrand, and P. Fonlupt, “Listening in Silence Activates Auditory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2006): 273–278.
8. D. Kramer, C. Macrae, A. Green, and W. Kelley, “Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex,” Nature 434 (2005): 158. For related phenomena in the primary visual cortex, and with related dynamics, wholly in the absence of visual stimulus, see K. Wang et al., “Spontaneous Activity Associated with Primary Visual Cortex: A Resting-State fMRI Study,” Cerebral Cortex 18 (2008): 697–704. Hunter et al., “Neural Activity,” suggest that such spontaneous activation of the auditory cortex may underlie the widespread experience among humans of auditory hallucinations.
9. Wang et al., “Spontaneous Activity,” 702.
10. M. van Schouwenburg, H. den Ouden, and R. Cools, “The Human Basal Ganglia Modulate Frontal-Posterior Connectivity During Attention Shifting,” Journal of Neuroscience 30 (2010): 9910–9918, here page 9916. For the role of the insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex in salience detection, see V. Menon and L. Uddin, “Saliency, Switching, Attention and Control: A Network Model of Insula Function,” Brain Structure and Function 214 (2010): 655–667; N. Medford and H. Critchley, “Conjoint Activity of Anterior Insular and Anterior Cingulate Cortex: Awareness and Response,” Brain Structure and Function 214 (2010): 535–549; and M. Brass and P. Haggard, “The Hidden Side of Intentional Action: The Role of the Anterior Insular Cortex,” Brain Structure and Function 214 (2010): 603–610. For neurotransmitters in these phenomena, see D. Tomasi et al., “Dopamine Transporters in Striatum Correlate with Deactivation in the Default Mode Network During Visuospatial Attention,” PLOS One 4 (2009): e6102; and S. Kähkönen et al., “Dopamine Modulates Involuntary Attention Shifting and Reorienting: An Electromagnetic Study,” Clinical Neurophysiology 113 (2002): 1894–1902. The role of oxytocin is discussed in M. Ellenbogen et al., “The Acute Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on Automatic and Effortful Attentional Shifting to Emotional Faces,” Psychophysiology 49 (2012): 128–137. For dissociability of attention elements, see R. Cools, R. Ivry and M. D’Esposito, “The Human Striatum Is Necessary for Responding to Changes in Stimulus Relevance,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2006): 1973–1983; F. Mottaghy et al., “Systems Level Modeling of a Neuronal Network Subserving Intrinsic Alertness,” NeuroImage 29 (2006): 225–233; C. Thiel, K. Zilles, and G. Fink, “Cerebral Correlates of Alerting, Orienting and Reorienting of Visuospatial Attention: An Event-Related fMRI Study,” NeuroImage 21 (2004): 318–328.
11. Makers of thrillers and horror films may intuit this, often marking significant events by brief episodes of anticipatory silence. I owe this observation to Brian Clayton.
12. S. Majerus et al., “Attention Supports Verbal Short-Term Memory via Competition Between Dorsal and Ventral Attention Networks,” Cerebral Cortex 22 (2012): 1086–1097. Compare also N. Cowan, “The Focus of Attention as Observed in Visual Working Memory Tasks: Making Sense of Competing Claims,” Neurophysiologia 49 (2011): 1401–1406; and T. Kelley and N. Lavie, “Working Memory Load Modulates Distractor Competition in Primary Visual Cortex,” Cerebral Cortex 21 (2011): 659–665.
13. E. Awh and J. Jonides, “Overlapping Mechanisms of Attention and Spatial Working Memory,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (2001): 119–126; B. Postle et al., “The Where and How of Attention-Based Rehearsal in Spatial Working Memory,” Cognitive Brain Research 20 (2004): 194–205; E. Awh, E. Vogel, and S.-H. Oh, “Interactions Between Attention and Working Memory,” Neuroscience 139 (2006): 201–208; G. Woodman and S. Luck, “Visual Search Is Slowed When Visuospatial Working Memory Is Occupied,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11 (2004): 269–274. For limits on the capacity of working memory, see E. Ester et al., “Neural Measures Reveal a Fixed Limit in Subitizing,” Journal of Neuroscience 32 (2012): 7169–7177. And for genetic factors that may influence storage capacity of short-term memory, see D. Anderson, T. Bell, and E. Awh, “Polymorphisms in the 5-HTTLPR Gene Mediate Storage Capacity of Visual Working Memory,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24 (2012): 1069–1076. It is really not possible for humans to detect changes in something like a film image without using their short-term memory to do so: K. Inui et al., “Non-Linear Laws of Echoic Memory and Auditory Change Detection in Humans,” BMC Neuroscience 11 (2010): 80.
14. There is here a whole area suitable for “neurocinematic” investigation which, so far as I can tell, has not yet been broached. The way forward, scientifically, may be laid down in R. Benoit et al., “Rostral Prefrontal Cortex and the Focus of Attention in Prospective Memory,” Cerebral Cortex 22 (2012): 1876–1886.
15. Marie finds some relief by writing her book and presenting it at the London Book Fair, where evidently it receives a warm welcome, judging from the number of people who buy copies and ask her to sign them. It is ironic, then, that George contacts Marie after his brief encounter with her at the book fair by means of a hand-written letter (the contents of which we do not learn). But these writing episodes are no substitute for real, warm, human relationships. Marcus meets George at the book fair, also; thus writing serves to mediate all these contacts and the solutions they afford.
16. D. Byrge, “Dialogue with Clint Eastwood,” August 14, 2002 (with specific reference to the film Blood Work), http://business.highbeam.com/2012/article-1G1-90305622/dialogue-clint-eastwood. The interview was originally made for and reported in the August 2, 2002, Hollywood Reporter.
17. For a neurobiological perspective, see E. Bates and F. Dick, “Language, Gesture, and the Developing Brain,” Developmental Psychology 40 (2002): 293–310; R. Willems and P. Hagoort, “Neural Evidence for the Interplay Between Language, Gesture, and Action: A Review,” Brain and Language 101 (2007): 278–289. For the developmental perspective, see S. Özçalişkan and S. Goldin-Meadow, “Gesture Is at the Cutting Edge of Early Language Development,” Cognition 96 (2005): B101–B113; J. Iverson and S. Goldin-Meadow, “Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 367–371. And for communicative gesturing among chimpanzees, see A. Halloran, The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). See also S. Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
18. For some recent studies and reviews of these phenomena, see D. Sander et al., “Interaction Effects of Perceived Gaze Direction and Dynamic Facial Expression: Evidence for Appraisal Theories of Emotion,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 19 (2007): 470–480; P. Vuilleumier and G. Pourtois, “Distributed and Interactive Brain Mechanisms During Emotion Face Perception: Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 174–194. The early ontogeny of this ability in human infants is reviewed in T. Grossman, “The Development of Emotion Perception in Face and Voice During Infancy,” Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 28 (2010): 219–236. Unfortunately, Grossman’s otherwise admirable study is marred by ignoring the work of A. N. Meltzoff and others on “cross-modal perception” in infants, which is almost certainly an innate cognitive capacity: see discussion in R. McClelland, “Autistic Space,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 16 (1993): 197–232. The importance of attention in these processes is considerable, and qualifies what is otherwise a largely automatic process: see L. Pessoa et al., “Neural Processing of Emotional Faces Requires Attention,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002): 11458–11463; A. Holmes, P. Vuilleumier, and M. Eimer, “The Processing of Emotional Facial Expression Is Gated by Spatial Attention: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials,” Cognitive Brain Research 16 (2003): 174–184; and L. Pessoa, “To What Extent Are Emotional Visual Stimuli Processed Without Attention and Awareness?,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 15 (2005): 188–196. The vital role of the amygdala in such emotional facial processing is revealed especially by lesion studies: see P. Vuilleumier et al., “Distant Influences of Amygdala Lesion on Visual Cortical Activation During Emotional Face Processing,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 1271–1278. Some genetic determinants are discussed in A. Brown et al., “Genetic Variants Affecting the Neural Processing of Human Facial Expressions: Evidence Using a Genome-Wide Functional Imaging Approach,” Translational Psychiatry 2 (2012): e143, July 24, 2012, http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v2/n7/full/tp201267a.html.
19. N. Mailer, “All the Pirates and People,” Parade Magazine, October 23, 1983, 4–7, quotation from page 6.
20. Eastwood quoted in ibid., 6.
21. D. Byrge, “Dialogue with Clint Eastwood,” August 14, 2002, http://business.highbeam.com/2012/article-1G1-90305622/dialogue-clint-eastwood.
22. Such effects are not limited to Hereafter. The emotionally climactic scene in The Bridges of Madison County (1995) involves Eastwood standing in the pouring rain, utterly silent but eloquently communicating by his whole bodily expression the despair and longing that his character feels. There is a wider study than the present one to be made of Eastwood’s silences. There is likewise a further study to be made of his use and treatment of despair.
23. M. Smith, “What Difference Does It Make? Science, Sentiment, and Film,” Projections 2 (2008): 60–77, here page 75. The focus on realism is, in my view, one of the most valuable aspects of this essay.
24. L. Baker, Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 233.
25. Smith, “What Difference Does It Make?,” 75.
26. U. Hasson, R. Malach, and D. Heeger, “Reliability of Cortical Activity During Natural Stimulation,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (2010): 40–48; U. Hasson et al., “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections 2 (2008): 1–26; and compare J. Cutting, J. DeLong, and C. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 432–439. It is a further matter to try to discover how very subtle interactions between film viewers themselves might affect the quality of the filmic experience for viewers.